post-Agreement Northern Ireland Research Articles

The Identity Crisis in Post-agreement Northern Ireland: Evidence from the Theatre Production Cyprus Avenue

Historical issues led to "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, which lasted for almost 30 years. The impact of this protracted struggle on society and its citizens was significant, even if the two sides of the dispute were ultimately able to come to an understanding. As a symbol of a person's link to society, identity plays a significant part in this process. Due to their poor environmental adaption in the post-conflict era, many people may experience identity crises because they are unsure of their original identities. This essay will look into the reasons for this issue and attempt to offer solutions for the identity crisis following the conflict. Since theatre can effectively represent several social concerns, this article will take a case study method and select a specific play, "Cyprus Avenue," by David Ireland, from 2016, as a case study to evaluate the primary causes of the identity crisis. It was determined that the reasons for the identity crisis were the limitations of their identity-building strategies and the changes in the social environment.

Anticipating Northern Ireland’s post-Agreement novel: narrative suspension in Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness

ABSTRACTThis article reads Deirdre Madden’s novel One by One in the Darkness (1996) as a transitional text from post-ceasefire to post-Agreement Northern Irish fiction. The article does so by taking into account the novel’s sceptical treatment of a possible peace agreement through various modes of narrative suspension, something that would find a renewed expression in the works of fiction published in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. Madden’s retrospective narration anticipates the Agreement’s rhetorical suspension of the country’s violent history even before it was signed in 1998 and in doing so, it certainly paved way to post-Agreement fiction’s penchant for re-imagining the past. The reading seeks to explore the novel’s proleptic potential in anticipating post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s suspended political situation through three interrelated conceptual frames – Benita Parry’s “anachrony”, Marcel Proust’s “involuntary memory” and Paul Ricoeur’s “affective trace”.

Class, political economy and loyalist political disaffection: agonistic politics and the flag protests

The flag protests in Northern Ireland (2012–13) offer an opportunity on the one hand to examine the politics of dispossession, national identity, decline and political violence in loyalist areas in Belfast. On the other, they are an opportunity to examine of hope, leadership and change within working class loyalism – not least, around the re-imagining of what Britishness can/could or perhaps should mean in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. This article offers an activist-academic perspective on and interpretation of the meaning and potential of those protests around how they reveal both a fracturing and potential for rethinking Britishness. It suggests the possibilities and limits of an inclusive, civic, rather than ethnic, national identity, and a sense of Britishness sufficient to the task of agonistic (as opposed to antagonistic) engagement and contestation with Irish nationalism and republicanism. By antagonistic I mean relations that are characterised in whole or part in terms of ‘friend-enemy’ thus containing within them the possibility of violence, while by agonistic I mean oppositional relations that do not contain this threat of violence. Agonism (from Greek agon, meaning ‘struggle’) emphasises the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how we might accept and channel this positively. It is also to affirm the legitimacy of one’s political adversary and their objectives even if one fundamentally disagrees with those objectives. The article argues that an agonistic conceptualisation of democracy and democratic change understood as non-violent disagreement (as opposed to consensus and agreement) is a more accurate and useful understanding than a conceptualisation of democracy and politics as either agreement or antagonism. In this way one can interpret the flag protests as vacillating between a legitimate democratic agonistic politics of struggle and contestation and an illegitimate, reactionary antagonistic politics of violence and threat.

Neither/Nor: The rejection of Unionist and Nationalist identities in post-Agreement Northern Ireland

Since 2006, according to the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, the largest portion of people in Northern Ireland identify themselves not as Unionist nor Nationalist but as Neither. This fact is difficult to tally with the patterns of polarised election results and the narratives of a ‘culture war’ that dominate most analyses of contemporary Northern Ireland. This article examines the existence of this large portion of the population in Northern Ireland who reject the identities upon which the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement is centred. We find that those identifying as neither Unionist nor Nationalist are predominantly female, they come from all religious backgrounds, all age groups, and both British and Irish national identities. The majority of those who identify as Neither appear to do so as a statement of rejection of what is on offer from the political parties in Northern Ireland; rather than supporting a centrist party, they support no party at all. The article concludes that the 1998 Agreement has created the conditions for a growing number of people to identify as neither Unionist nor Nationalist, but at the same time it makes the emergence of any strong alternative, ‘third way’ type of politics difficult to envisage.

‘We Shall Overcome’? The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement

While 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in Northern Ireland, it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights movement and the protests of 1968. One of the key innovations of the Agreement is that it makes issues of rights central to the broader consociational framework, with the entirety of section 6 devoted to ‘Rights, Safeguards and Equality of opportunity.’ This reinforces a perception that the GFA is a culmination of the civil rights movement and its aims; and that the conflict itself was based on issues of rights. The civil rights movement continues to be an enduring collective memory for the nationalist community in post-Agreement Northern Ireland, but since 1998 it has become a site of contested memory. This article considers the civil rights movement’s reputational trajectory since 1998, questioning why this is so, and why it is so ripe for appropriation. It will also examine how different memories of the movement have been mobilized to serve various and sometimes competing agendas. In doing so, it will explore the cultural and political power the memory of ‘rights’ had in the Agreement and in the two decades since.

Doing justice to the troubles: Imaginary reconciliations and restorative memory in post-agreement Northern Ireland

Doing Justice to the Troubles: Imaginary Reconciliations and Restorative Memory in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

‘The Need for Whitewash and Disinfectant’: Eoghan McTigue’s All Over Again

Eoghan McTigue’s exhibition entitled All Over Again documents the erasure of several republican and loyalist murals in Belfast between 2001 and 2003, prior to the launch of the ‘Re-imaging Communities’ project and explores the discrepancy between post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s perceived abnormality and the desire for it to be ‘normal’ again.

‘The Need for Whitewash and Disinfectant’: Eoghan McTigue’s All Over Again

Eoghan McTigue’s exhibition entitled All Over Again documents the erasure of several republican and loyalist murals in Belfast between 2001 and 2003, prior to the launch of the ‘Re-imaging Communities’ project and explores the discrepancy between post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s perceived abnormality and the desire for it to be ‘normal’ again.

‘There's Just No Point Having a Token Woman’: Gender and Representation in the Democratic Unionist Party in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

Politics in Northern Ireland suffers from a dearth of female representation, a problem that has traditionally been more acute within unionist parties than their nationalist counterparts (Galligan and Wilford, 1999, ‘Women and Politics’. In Mitchell, P. and Wilford, R. (eds) Politics in Northern Ireland, Oxford, Oxford University Press). This is despite the aim of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to establish equality provisions for women. This article draws upon substantive and unique access to data gathered from an extensive membership study of Northern Ireland's largest party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) (Tonge, J., Braniff, M., Hennessey, T., McAuley, J., and Whiting, S. (2014) The Democratic Unionist Party: From Protest to Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press) to explore how attitudes towards female representation impact upon inequalities in gender representation in Northern Ireland. Exploring how women have fared in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland since 1998, this article examines the position of women within party politics and utilises interview and survey material on the DUP. The article identifies a more progressive cohort within the party membership that wants to see more gender equality. Yet, the legacy of the peace process has meant positive discrimination remains anathema to the vast majority within Northern Ireland's largest political party.

The Limits of Local Accommodation: Why Contentious Events Remain Prone to Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article examines the difficulties of finding local solutions to the problem of contentious events in contemporary Northern Ireland. In so doing, it offers a sociological perspective on fundamental divisions in Northern Ireland: between classes and between communities. It shows how its chosen case study—parades and associated protests in north Belfast—exemplifies the most fundamental problem that endures in post-Agreement Northern Ireland, namely that political authority is not derived from a common civic culture (as is the norm in Western liberal democracy) but rather that legitimacy is still founded on the basis of the culture of either one or the other community. Haugaard's reflections on authority and legitimacy are used to explore Northern Ireland's atypical experience of political conflict vis-à-vis the Western liberal democratic model. The Bourdieusian concepts of field illusio and doxa help to explain why it is that parading remains such an important political and symbolic touchstone in this society.

Women's Citizenship in Northern Ireland after the 1998 Agreement

This article explores the consequences for women's citizenship that arise from the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. It argues that, despite the promises of inclusion and equality set out in the peace document, subsequent institutional arrangements and policy decisions have retained gendered exclusions and reasserted gender stereotypes. With the further institutionalisation of ethnonationalism as the dominant political discourse through the changes ratified in the St Andrews Agreement, the political settlement has failed to address fully the gendered legacy of conflict and fulfil the democratic promises of advancing women's citizenship claims. However, despite persisting constraints, women continue the pattern of active civic engagement in the community and voluntary sector and pursue lobbying strategies that strive to make their claims relevant in institutionalised policymaking spheres. At the same time, the article maintains that the emergence of new forms of feminist grass-roots activism, exemplified by the Belfast Feminist Network, contributes to enhancing women's citizenship claims in the broader cultural and social context of post-Agreement Northern Ireland.

Managing culture in post-conflict societies

An extensive literature has paid attention to the role of cultural identity and symbols as markers of ethnic conflict. Yet we do not understand fully whether cultural expressions at the heart of the conflict are transformed into a new post-conflict symbolic landscape or whether they remain the source of ongoing cultural contestation. I explore this question by investigating cultural contestation in post-Agreement Macedonia and Northern Ireland. Theoretically, I consider the importance of cultural differences in the integration versus accommodation debate on constitutional design in divided societies. Empirically, I draw on original research from the two cases whereby the respective peace agreements were designed to manage a self-determination dispute. First, I argue that symbolic controversies relating to cultural emblems, flags and insignia pose a particular kind of test for the stability of power-sharing systems. In such instances ethnic elites are faced with the wider legacy and competing narratives of the conflict. In accommodationist systems, where the groups' cultural identity is to be promoted in both private and public spheres, instances of cultural contestation will likely trigger considerable political wrangling between ethnic parties in the search for compromise.

Who are the Victims? Victimhood Experiences in Postagreement Northern Ireland

The conflict in Northern Ireland left over 3,600 people dead and tens of thousands injured, but establishing who are victims and the very nature of victimhood has been difficult. In part this is due to the highly contested nature of the labels “victim” and “terrorist.” The present paper employed interpretative phenomenological analysis to gain a greater understanding of the conceptualisation of victimhood in Northern Ireland. Catholic and Protestant civilians, paramilitaries, politicians, security force personnel, and community activists who had experienced direct and/or indirect political violence were interviewed. Analysis of the interview transcripts revealed five themes related to internal, interpersonal, and macro aspects of victimhood. The participants illustrated how the label of victim was associated with both weakness and strength, depending on the audience. Interview responses also revealed that although participants were resilient, they suffered at least some temporary psychological trauma due to their exposure to political violence. In addition the analysis indicated that there was a psychological cost associated with perpetrating acts of political violence. These findings are discussed in relation to the need for a national or cross-national program of intergroup dialogue and truth recovery to provide closure to victims and reintegrate victims and perpetrators into the postconflict society.

Multiculturalism and sectarianism in post-agreement Northern Ireland

This research contributes to existing scholarship on contemporary multiculturalism by exploring how multicultural agendas are operationalised in Northern Ireland, a society divided along sectarian lines. This paper develops the key themes and arguments of this work through an analysis of anti-racist murals displayed in West Belfast. Looking at how different groups employ sectarian narratives and images in the production of their anti-racist messages I argue that a persistent sectarianism complicates the advancement of anti-racist agendas.

Loyalist Paramilitary Violence after the Belfast Agreement

This paper analyses the use of violence by Loyalist paramilitaries over the course of the peace process and after the Belfast Agreement. The focus is on a largely understudied area in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. It is argued that Loyalist paramilitaries have continually used violence to serve several objectives. These objectives of violence have shifted in dominance as the peace process unfolded. A typology of the objectives of Loyalist violence is presented which identifies violence as either between or within groups and in search of political, sectarian, economic, social and territorial aims. In conclusion, the article considers some implications of continuing Loyalist paramilitary violence for state and society.

Ethnic Outbidding and Party Modernization: Understanding the Democratic Unionist Party's Electoral Success in the Post-Agreement Environment

This article considers the phenomena of intra-group ethnic outbidding and party political modernization during peacemaking processes in civil war situations. At first glance, ethnic outbidding may seem unconnected with ‘modern’ political parties that function—as their modernity suggests—without recourse to ethnic exclusivity. This article makes the case that the two processes can operate in tandem. It begins by presenting an original conceptualization of outbidding processes by examining both the strategies employed by out-bidders and the potential impacts of outbidding on peacemaking processes. It then turns to consider political party modernization theory, which suggests that parties must abandon the appeals to confessionalism and ethnic particularism (usually displayed among intra-group outbidders) as part of the modernization process. As the example of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in post Agreement Northern Ireland illustrates however, the ability of political parties in peacemaking processes to mix traditional appeals with decidedly modern discourse and campaigning tools undermines this presumed incompatibility between particularlism and modernization within political parties. Instead we find that party modernization and ethnic outbidding can co-exist in the context of a peacemaking process. Moreover, we find that the nuances of outbidding mean that hard-line positions can be maintained on identity and constitutional issues but moderation can occur on other issues.

The United States and Post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001-6

On his inauguration in 2001, it was widely assumed that George W. Bush's presidency would signal the end of the United States' activist diplomacy in the Northern Ireland peace process. As such, it is unsurprising that the few existing accounts of the Bush administration's role in Northern Ireland have characterised its contribution as being negligible. This article will demonstrate, however, that the Bush administration has had a significant impact upon the politics of post-Agreement Northern Ireland, and that this is due to the autonomy that the White House grants to its special envoys to Northern Ireland. The Bush administration's role in post-Agreement Northern Ireland will also be compared to President Clinton's contribution to the peace process. Having completed the comparison, this article will conclude by arguing that in contrast to its self-described role as an 'honest broker', on balance, the United States has tended to side with the Irish government when disputes have arisen between Dublin and London.

The United States and Post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001-6

The United States and Post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001-6

The United States and post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001–6

The United States and post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001–6

Discourses of equality in post-Agreement Northern Ireland

This article analyses the use of equality as a concept central to the implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The authors argue that, although equality legislation is succeeding in redressing previous discrimination in society, the discourses that have emerged around it have exacerbated competition and polarization between communities for two main reasons. Firstly, in " selling' the Agreement to their supporters, political elites have appropriated community-specific definitions of the concept, thus reinforcing rather than weakening group differences. Secondly, the practice of equality legislation involves the definitive categorization of individuals as members of particular groups. This article examines these processes and their effects through the analysis of the discourse of nationalist and Unionist Party elites and of individual Catholics and Protestants. This is done in order to capture the dynamics of change in political communication and identification rather than simply describing institutional alterations.